Benevolent AIs may be an outside possibility. Otherwise, short of nuking ourselves back to the stone age, I think total surveillance societies are here to stay.
Benevolent AIs may be an outside possibility. Otherwise, short of nuking ourselves back to the stone age, I think total surveillance societies are here to stay.
So it will just happen again. (Meet the new boss, same as the old... Animal farm etc) without all of them being dismantled too. And revolutions of that scale rarely work out well for anyone in the short term.
Cash can mostly be tracked unless you just trade with black/grey market sellers. Adding RFID to notes and mandating readers on cash registers would already be feasible.
Home devices (TVs, DVRs, even fridges[1]) increasingly have microphones and other sensors, so it'll be hard to be sure you're not being recorded even when talking to friends in their living room.
[1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a24616/sa...
We could at least convert them into total sousveillance societies. If regular citizens can't have privacy, nobody should have privacy.